First came Miuccia's bananas, then Stella's lemons. Today, Wolfgang Joop had cherries. So, what is it with fruit this season? If nothing else, it's safe to say that these are all designers whose senses of humor are fully intact. In Joop's case, that also came across in the models' kooky striped body stockings and their exaggeratedly high platform wedges.

Apparently, the designer was inspired by a Portuguese garden, so in addition to those cherries, he had the most exuberantly colorful floral prints of the season, and that's saying something (see Jil Sander; Akris). They appeared on crinolined baby-doll dresses, over which Joop layered jackets haphazardly topstitched with contrasting thread. That detail almost looked like sutures. As the show progressed, he spliced his prints into the shoulder seams of one blazer and along the rear seams of another. By the end, the backs of jackets consisted of crisscrossing strips of pinstripes, khaki, and patterned chiffon. Joop's message seemed to be about the irrepressibility of nature. A little too irrepressible, in fact, as it appeared on his runway. His tailoring was as impeccable as it was imaginative, but it would take some serious pruning to make most of the looks in this show ready for real life.